Cellular networks for mobile communication have evolved greatly in the past few years. Today, a lot of traffic of cellular networks is made up by data traffic between mobile communication terminals and hosts.
However, compared to networks of fixed hosts, the capacity situation for mobile communication terminals varies greatly over time due to effects such as number of terminals in the same area, fading, multipath propagation, interference, etc.
For this reason, TCP (Transport Control Protocol) proxies have been introduced in cellular networks. The TCP proxies maintain TCP connections on the radio side, towards mobile communication terminals, which are better tailored to the traffic conditions. On the network side, the TCP proxies maintain TCP connections which are tailored to fixed network traffic.
While the TCP proxies address some of the issues of the disparate traffic conditions, the inherent inertia to change in the TCP protocol reduce the ability to react to quickly changing traffic conditions.